There’s been some interesting news regarding city hall this week with the revelation that Councillor Bill Sarai secretly recorded Mayor Reid Hamer-Jackson and then went on to deny being the source of that recording.

The recording contained an argument between the two men. This argument, from 2023, ended up resulting in investigations into the Mayor’s conduct as well as certain restrictions on Hamer-Jackson.

It’s a topic that everyone’s talking about right now, and justifiably so. It’s exactly the kind of story that gets people excited. Arguments. Controversy. Surreptitious recordings. Surprising revelations.

It’s the sort of story that can make for good journalism as well. Right now there are all sorts of speculations about how Sarai will move forward from this, and even if he should be allowed to move forward at all, with at least one online petition calling for his resignation.

And we’d love to have something in this issue about it. Unfortunately, we need to talk about the reality of print journalism.

One of the things we talked about when discussion began to try to bring a newspaper back to Kamloops is having to accept the reality that we simply will never be able to compete with online news sources’ ability to break news. Even if a story hits the day we intend to send an issue to press, we’re still at least two to three days away from having that issue out on the street and in people’s hands.

And that’s assuming we even have time to put that story together.

What we can do, though, is hopefully take the time to put together something maybe a bit more thoughtful. Something that dives a little deeper into the headline news. We may not be able to break a story, but hopefully the journalism that we’re able to do with a bit more time will still be worth reading when it ends up in your hands.

It’s also important to remember that the Kamloops Chronicle remains a work in progress. We don’t have a lot of hands on deck, and we’re doing what we can with the resources we have, with the hope that we’ll be able to grow and do better as we continue to publish.

The bottom line is, if you were expecting to see some news here this issue on the Bill Sarai story, we totally understand. But we need you to understand, this really isn’t the place for that kind of reporting.

There’s already plenty of news sources in Kamloops doing just that.